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A rare and unsettling insider's account of conditions in the 'Donetsk People's Republic.'...Aseyev examines unrelentingly, piercingly, and scathingly why Ukrainians in the east of the country supported, and continue to support, the separatists and mercenaries and their Kremlin sponsors-in effect, how Putin's misinformation campaign successfully revived the Soviet mindset in the Donbas. -- Julian Evans * Times Literary Supplement *
[A] fascinating account of life in the [Donetsk People's Republic]...Aseyev's book is a kind of Lonely Planet guide to a republic that doesn't officially exist, except in the minds of its fervent believers...The DPR is a Soviet Disneyland. There are icons of Stalin and Lenin, Komsomol youth leagues and shops selling cheap Russian sausage in Back-in-the-USSR-style packaging. It is a glorious march forward to a largely imaginary past, although there is nothing make-believe about the violence in the DPR. -- Colin Freeman * The Telegraph *

Few people can better articulate the experience of life under Russian occupation than Stanislav Aseyev, [who] gives a first-person account of the shelling, propaganda, and internal power struggles of Donetsk in the early days of the war that began there in 2014. The brutality and arbitrariness of rule in Russian-occupied Donbas that Aseyev depicts hint at what would await Ukraine in the event of a Russian-imposed regime, underscoring why the stakes of the war today could not possibly be higher.

-- Lilian Posner * Foreign Policy *

Stanislav Aseyev is a Donetsk-born Ukrainian writer and journalist. He is the author of a collection of poetry, a play, and a novel. Under the pen name Stanislav Vasin, he published short reports in Ukrainian press about the situation on the ground following the outbreak of Russian-sponsored military hostilities in Donbas. Arrested and unlawfully imprisoned by separatist militia forces for extremism and spying, Aseyev was held captive and subjected to mistreatment and intermittent torture for over two and a half years. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Taras Shevchenko National Prize for In Isolation.